And that's why I can't use most of the blue palette. I did some sprite tests yesterday and today and it looks like I forgot about the multiplayer colors. You might remember that the first few versions of the new sprite had a odd color palette, well it was like that for a reason. In multiplayer, the color is set using this color palette:

Spoiler:

So if I only used the later half of the palette, other colors would only use 4 colors in total and miss a lot of detailed stuff, for example if the first color was 234 and the second 235, that would be one color on 8 color palettes, which would look bad.
So I picked 8 colors which work with the color changing for the new main palette(I'm going to use extra colors for details later). The bad thing was that the first 2 colors(227 and 229) looked bad on the sprite, so I'm limited to 6 instead of 8 colors for the main detail palette.
This is how the new blue palette will look like, the first shade of blue is ok, it's part of the first few bright shades of blue and doesn't look too good but I don't want to only have 5 colors. I'll probably change the last shade of blue from the darkest to the second darkest color because it looked too dark on some multiplayer colors.
I also tested supersonic's colors, a bit too much gold and sometimes only full yellow on some frames, but the normal sonic has the same problem, so I guess it's ok. Let's hope that LUA gets custom skincolor/supercolor support one day so I can make it work better.
Did some changes on the head shading but the legs are unfinished for now.

This is only a small update, looks like I'll have to redo the sprites that were done again, but this time the blue palette will be set.

Something I did last weekend.
As you can see sonic's sprites are now displayed at a different angle(10 degrees) so that it looks better with the camera. I also did the palette change, the sprite colors look way better in multiplayer now and the other shades are way more different.

Not sure if I should be happy with that back sprite but the other back sprite already looked different from the other sprites. The back sprite is a bit smaller but that's because of the camera angle.

The shading of the backsprite is kinda weird in my opinion: The Middle Quill seems stitched on, and the side quills seem to have some sort of light source between eachother. Plus the quills seem overly rounded near the ends, which makes the sonic look more like its some sort of plush. The shading that was on the original back sprites is kinda close to what I'm picturing, to be honest.

The shading of the backsprite is kinda weird in my opinion: The Middle Quill seems stitched on, and the side quills seem to have some sort of light source between eachother. Plus the quills seem overly rounded near the ends, which makes the sonic look more like its some sort of plush. The shading that was on the original back sprites is kinda close to what I'm picturing, to be honest.

The quills are round like that on the unleashed model, it's like that. Can't leave the bottom spines completely dark because they look bad if they are unshaded, the shade of blue is already 2-3 shades darker than the one used on top(and I can't use brighter shades for the top spikes because srb2's blue isn't that great on brighter shades). Saw the problem with the bottom spike shading when I looked at the sprite again but I didn't have time to fix it, trying to get the model uncorrupted first.

Hey um... the body looks kind of... fat. At least from the back. Edit that and it would look a bit better. So far, this is looking AWESOME!

Again, this happens because of the view angle, going to upload a full rotation gif soon so it's easier to see.

Good news, the model is finally fixed now(had to re-rip everything and it was a pain to get it back in the editor, now I only need to add the textures again and hope that the animations can be merged(which probably won't work).

I think the main issue that causes cylinder quills is that the highlight on the quills is not shaped like the rest of the quill, and is kinda... flatish. I recommend looking at the shading from the model itself to base your shading off of, which would allow for fixing the issues with that, the bottom quills, and the pillow shading lookalike on the shoes and gloves.
Basically, your main issue with the shading is the lack of the influence of the shape, as well as the surrounding shapes.

Didn't post any news for some time. I tried to fix the corrupted unleashed model, which didn't work so I ripped the model using the released .gno script(and also ripped super sonic's model and werehog's). The new model works much better(no glued object groups or selecting object groups if you didn't), but sadly the rig isn't the same as the old one, so I can't port the animations(I could try to recreate them frame by frame but won't do that), so I'll have to make new animations again.
I thought about remaking the back sprite(I didn't like it when I first released it but didn't know how to fix it, a bit later I found the "error" but never really had time to fix it, but I finally had some time today):
I think that this looks way better now.(even if it's useless because there will be new sprites).

Alright, the bottom quills look far better (tad too dark on the bottom but thats fineish.)
However, I still feel that the lighting on the top quills lacks the shape of them, causing it to look overly round at the end... if it were to slowly taper out, it would look a little better.

Do want to say a few things here though.
First of all, one thing that killed it for me were the constant changes, don't think I need to say through how many versions I went but constantly you'd adjust something, just for people to then know it better and say this needs to be like that and this like that and so on...
Not to sound like I want to go against critique but it sucks if one just got some sprites done and then has to pretty much go all over them again due to this being requested and all that.

With that said, I do admit that certain parts of it really SUCKED, however I'd also like to say that the SRB2 Palette is being a ... being a nuisance to work with and get it to look decent due to the shades not having that much difference in them and it going into one of the ugliest bright blues possible...

To note what this WON'T be:
-This won't be Motorroach's Modern Sonic, while that one looks nice in SRB2's style, this project is something different and started before that, don't try to force me to create that.
-This won't be a hires skin.
-This will be using other unconventional ways to do the sprites, if you don't like that and hate it you can keep it for yourself but I absolutely won't tolerate any bullshit like "Oh it's being cheap and using a 3d model, that's why it sucks" or other things like "this is being low effort", not my fault if people didn't use other advantages to get the sprites right and have a easier time, especially with side angles and stuff like walking frames.

Now that this is out of the way, I hope we can have a enjoyable and constructive time with this and that this will see the light of the day one day in Releases.